Sunday, December 16, 2018

My gregarious Uncle Gus
used to greet people with a salutation that began, “Shake the hand that shook
the hand of...” and would supply names, invariably fantasized, ranging from
Babe Ruth to Spike Jones to Weenie Phimpf.

But there is a serious side
to the concept, and I am grateful, myself, to have been born and reared in a
time and places, and infected with certain interests, that I can say I met many
pioneer figures in cartooning and cinema history and legends from country music
to jazz.

That is one of the reasons
I share these memories in A Crowded Life via Yesterday’s Papers. Also, I
want to record pieces of history – of people I wanted to interview “before the
colors fade” – before my own colors fade. And… to encourage cognoscenti to
gather all the information they can manage as they explore and learn.

As I remember my friendship
with Walter Berndt, creator of the famous Smitty comics strip, I dug out
a letter he wrote and tucked into a Smitty reprint book in which he drew
asketch. A portion put me in this
mathematical-tinged nostalgic mood:

Indeed. The book was
printed in 1928, and this note and sketch were sent to me in 1968.But I can say Ye gods; gulp; and Yipes,
myself, as I write this precisely 50 years subsequent. So I can recall a
friendship with a man whose character starred in a reprint book 90 years ago.
In fact his Smitty strip itself will have its 100th birthday
in 2022.

Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1931

His strip was “vintage” in
1968, yet was popular enough – and Walt was vital enough – that the very next
year he was awarded the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben award. His
colorful origins reflect the halcyon days of comic strips’ first steps. When he
was 16 he secured a job as office boy in the bullpen of the New York Journal,
putting him in direct contact with George Herriman, Winsor McCay, Cliff
Sterrett, TAD Dorgan, Elzie Segar, and others.

Walt graduated from pushing
brooms to fraternizing during breaks to inking pencil lines and filling in
blacks and drawing backgrounds to occasionally submitting his own drawings.

His signature can be found
on Hearst fill-in features; then strips and panels for other newspapers and syndicates
around New York. In 1922 he scored with, I think, Bill the Office Boy
(happy inspiration) at the Daily News. In a familiar episode of
inspiration, the legendary editor Captain Joseph Patterson re-named the young
hero Smitty. Eventually Smitty’s parents provided a little brother, Herby. In
the cast also were Mr Bailey, the office boss, and – as Smitty matured to teen
years – girl friends like Ginny.

Walt lived in Port
Jefferson, in a grand house on a promontory, and I occasionally visited him after
I started a job as cartoonist and editor at the Connecticut Herald. It
was old-fashioned fun, actually, to take the Bridgeport-Port Jeff ferry. Once
my fiancee Nancy joined me (Sagamore Hill was on the agenda that day too) and
she was charmed by thye old boy.

The only people who were
not charmed by the warmth and friendliness of Walter Berndt were those who had
not met him.

When I became Associate
Editor / Comics of the News Syndicate, it was just after Smitty was
retired, in 1973. Walt lived until 1979. The Long Island chapter of the NCS
meets in formal honor of Walt, calling itself the “Berndt Toast Society.”
Fitting, for its conviviality. (Walt pronounced his name in the manner that
invited a pun, but the German pronunciation – there is a German couple in my
church sharing the surname – is “bairnt.”)

Another aspect of his name:
his signature. And it returns us to the happy headwaters of comics lore. Walt
shared how TAD Dorgan, the legendary sports and panel cartoonist, befriended
the office boy who aspired to draw newspaper comics, too. Dorgan supposed that
Walt’s signature could be a tad (sorry) more distinctive, and he invited the
boy to appropriate the “T” from TAD’s own famous trademark. Thus are torches
passed!

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

When the New York
Herald-Tribune was in its last gasps in the 1950s, it truly was a “gray
lady” (the nickname often applied to the New York Times) in view of its
stately dignity, rarified pedigree, and, um, imminent demise.

The merger of the New York Tribune,
child of the eccentric vegetarian, Republican critic of Abraham Lincoln, and
1872 presidential candidate Horace Greeley; and the New York Herald, the
“penny daily” whose Scottish founder James Gordon Bennett sent Henry Stanley to
find Dr Livingston, I presume, in darkest Africa, the Herald-Tribune was
the legatee of amazing traditions.

The Trib, as it
commonly was called even after its 1924 merger, had other limbs on its family
tree. When Greeley’s successor Whitelaw Reid was Publisher and Editor he
reinforced the power of its weekly National Edition, and the Tribune was
regarded as themouthpiece of the
Republican Party (much as the New York World came to be regarded as the
semi-official Democrat organ after Joseph Pulitzer bought the paper). Reid was
so active in GOP circles that he was tapped as Vice Presidential candidate in
1892; his ticket, with Benjamin Harrison running for a second term, lost. And
Theodore Roosevelt named Reid Ambassador to the Court of St James.

April 18, 1959

The Herald was
always interesting. Behind its conservative exterior and layout, it was almost
as “yellow” as the Journal and the World in its
scandal-mongering. It was as enterprising, too: it produced color supplements
(on rag paper) and color comics and cartoons before Pulitzer or Hearst joined
the game. Buster Brown was created in the Herald; and Little
Nemo was born there too. Winsor McCay had been lured to New York by
Bennett’s sister paper, the Telegraph. The Bennetts also published the
Paris, France, edition of the Herald. Dignified-looking, too, but when I
mentioned its “yellow” aspect I submit as testimony the fact that far back as
the 1880s – and as recently as 15 years ago in the International
Herald-Tribune – classified ads appeared for prostitutes, something shunned
by other newspapers. Like “escorts” today, here and there, those ads
advertisedcompanionship, company for
the lonely businessman, lovely tour guides, and, well, escorts.

It seems I have gone off on
a tangent before the main point of this essay. But… a flavor of what the Trib
was in the 1950s. Respected, colorful, and doddering. Many newspapers in
New York were in their death throes.

The Trib did not go
down without a fight, however. In the 1950s it was distinguished paper with
notable writers – opinion, reporting, and features. Tom Wolfe cut his eye teeth
there. They were connected to Newsweek magazine, on the rise as it was
receding. It was the “voice” of the Republican Establishment: that is, the
East-Coast Rockefeller wing. In the early ‘60s I was at a luncheon and sat next
to Clay Felker, who was fashioning its revolutionary Sunday magazine, bold in
design and editorial focus, that would soon evolve to a life of its own as… the
newsstand New York magazine.

In the interregnum, the Trib’s
weak sister, the Herald-Tribune Syndicate, having limped along with ancient
features like Clare Briggs’ old Mr and Mrs, and merely old features like
Harry Haenigsen’s Penny and Our Bill, was about the last
syndicate to which cartoonists would submit their strips. Last stop, last try,
last chance.

… which means the syndicate
could either die, or go one way: up.

And now we get to the nub
of this chapter of A Crowded Life in Cartooning. One of the cartoonists
who caught fire there in the 1950s. It was amazing, really… and exciting for
kids like me who instinctively recognized when new and hip and exciting strips
were breaking through.

Johnny Hart sold BC,
and it was different. And funny! I think Harry Welker was the
name of the syndicate chief then, and he was either wise or lucky. Or both.
Johnny’s strip was one of a kind. Arnold Roth sold Poor Arnold’s Almanac;
wild. Al Jaffee did the oddly formatted Tall Tales. The Trib
landed Peanuts; although from a different syndicate, the paper picked it
up when new because no other New York paper wanted it. Suddenly the Trib’s
Sunday comics – even when they printed them in black and white during a period
of penury – were hip, and fun, and Must-Read.

Intellectual strips, most
of them were called. “In the tradition of Krazy Kat and Barnaby.
Yeah. And there was the strip with little kids with big heads and scribbly
props. Adult sarcasm from their mouths while Charlie Brown was still a
blockhead. Miss Peach. By Mell.

Mell? What’s a Mell? Gee,
that cast was funny. Kids in Miss Peach’s classroom at the Kelly School. Many
gags were single, long panels, with dialog reflecting the kids’ distinct
personalities. I wanted to talk like all of them; even Arthur, sometimes.

Miss Peach by Mell Lazarus was an instant classic, and an instant hit. There
was a great, early reprint collection, for which Al Capp wrote the Foreword. I
learned that Mell worked for him at one time, in the sweat-shop that churned
out Li’l Abner comic books and licensed items.

I met Mell a few years
after my initial enthrallment, at a National Cartoonists Society meeting I
described here recently. He was one of the cartoonists who signed a big poster
to me. I remember when I got home that night, my dad thrilled by all the
cartoonists’ sketches, but the one that made himlaugh out loud, was Mell’s drawing of Miss Peach and a bunch of the kids. She says: “Say hello to Dick, class!” They say, in
unison, “Hello to Dick class!”

Within a dozen years I was
Mell’s editor at Publisher’s Syndicate, never ever having to ask him about late
strips or content problems. A joy. And… by then he was also drawing Momma,
which had more client papers than Miss Peach. A mitzvah. A nicer man
and better friend – or funnier one – did not exist in cartooning.

August 1, 1959

One story that not everyone
knows. When he was a galley slave in the shop of Al Capp and his brother Eliot
Caplin, Mell somehow (!) conceived the idea of a conniving pair of bosses who
thought they could create an idea, attract investors – in fact multiple and
overlapping investors – with a concept so stinko it was sure to fail; and they
would keep the “lost” capital. Until…

… until the stinko property
was a success. If you find yourself, right now, humming “Springtime for
Hitler,” you’re getting warm. Mell’s book was titled The Boss is Crazy Too.
A modest success as a paperback book. Nobody ever accused Mel Brooks or anyone
else – well, some of us thought it would be justice to make a public fuss – of
swiping the concept for The Producers. But imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery, no?

Traditional studies have identified the penny blood, or penny dreadful, as an evolution of the gothic novel popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bibliographer Michael Sadleir first suggested the theory, which was repeated by Montague Summers in 1940 [2]. The first chapter of E.S. Turner’s popular study Boys Will Be Boys was titled The Gothic Hangover [3]. I have found it more fruitful to widen that view, identifying the penny blood as just one string in a long cultural evolution rooted in the last dying speeches, criminal biographies, and Newgate Calendars popular in previous generations. The Spectator in 1845 noticed that “the sermons and biographies of the Newgate Ordinary are the great originals of the Jack Sheppard and Paul Clifford schools of romance [4].” By the 1830s, to keep printing presses from lying idle, publishers and printers of unstamped newspapers, political pamphlets and anti-clerical tracts turned to weekly accounts issued in penny numbers composed of true and fictional crimes, supernatural wonders, and domestic romances. Some of the penny bloods, such as Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, and Vileroy; or, The Horrors of Zindorf Castle, drew their inspiration from the Gothic novel, but the Gothic influence was filtered through the fierce popular melodrama of the London stage. Also influential was the catchpenny press whose dying confessions, broad-sheets and street ballads were bawled about the suburbs of London from dawn to dusk.The term “penny bloods” refers to the penny parts works published in the thirties, forties, and fifties by publishers like Benjamin Davey Cousins, Edward Lloyd, and George Purkess [5]. Thomas Frost, who wrote a variety of bloods in the forties, described them as “Newgate romances.” In contemporary articles and newspaper accounts these sanguinary works were described as “highwayman literature,” “literature of the rails,” “gallows literature,” “thieves’ literature,” “criminal literature,” “Tyburn literature,” “felon literature,” “yellow literature,” “foul literature,” “kitchen literature,” “literature of horror,” “obscene literature,” “gutter literature,” “literature of the people,” and “literature of the lower orders.” In later centuries, they were the “literature of vice,” “mischievous literature,” “literary sewage,” “pernicious literature,” “satanic literature,” or “sensational literature.” In 1886 author Thomas Frost conveyed a sensational story to the proprietor of a large circulation illustrated popular periodical who he does not name. “I am unable to say,” Frost wrote, “whether this publication is one of those which we sometimes hear spoken of as “penny dreadfuls,” because I have never heard that term defined, or any publication assigned by title to that category [6].”The term “penny bloods” did not exist before 1892, except in phrases such as “bloody-bones school” and “penny blood and thunder.” The phrase was an invention of early penny “blood” collectors like Arthur Edward Waite, Barry Ono, John Medcraft, and Frank Jay. These collectors and booksellers popularized the term to describe the bloodthirsty literature they craved for their book-shelves and recalled from their childhood reading. The Melbourne bookseller J.P. Quaine used to address his letters to these old boy’s book collector’s as “Dear Blood Brother,” and sign off “thine in gore.” Writing to a customer in 1951 Quaine explained the view of collectors: “The use of the word “Blood” and “Dreadful” seems a matter of choice. It is generally accepted that a Penny Dreadful should be used to describe wildly imaginative or school stories, not necessarily of a gory nature, while the “blood’ means the really fierce and gory yarns of pirates, highwaymen and cut throats generally. But all the old journals had a bit of both and they would be hard to classify; however, most of the Hogarth’s, Fox’s and Brett’s were bloods purely and simply, especially the Hogarth House lot [7].”

The first known use of the term “penny dreadful” was in The Bookseller of February 28, 1867, and in 1874 a new edition of John Camden Hotten’s Slang Dictionary defined the phrase as “an expressive term for those penny publications which depend more upon sensationalism than upon merit, artistic or literary, for success [8].” James Greenwood coined a similar term, “penny awfuls,” in 1869 [9]. ‘Researches in Cheap Popular Literature,’ from The Social Science Review, 1864 describes the serial weekly Halfpenny Gazette, which it later identifies as having a “youth” audience, as being vulgarly known as the “A’penny Orrifier.” That is very close to a “penny dreadful.”Unlike the early “bloods” of Edward Lloyd, George Purkess, and William Clark, which were in the main adult literature, the “dreadful” came to represent a peculiar form of children’s literature of the late sixties and seventies, written almost exclusively for boys, and published in installments in weekly story papers, penny parts, and bound novels. From 1887, on into the twentieth century, reprints of American dime novels were known in Australia and New Zealand as “Deadwood Dicks.” The pejorative term referred to the popular Deadwood Dick tales, which were issued in the 6d. Life and Adventure Library. The publisher was The Aldine Publishing Company of London, which shipped and sold reprinted dime novels with flaring color covers throughout the British Empire.To avoid confusion, I (arbitrarily) adopt the term “penny blood” for sensational parts literature published in penny numbers between 1832 and 1859, chief among which were Ada the Betrayed, The String of Pearls, Tyburn Tree and The Mysteries of London, and “penny dreadful” for literature published in penny numbers from 1859, when James Malcolm Rymer began writing penny dreadful romances for Reynolds’s Miscellany, until 1933, when the Aldine Company, the last of the penny dreadful publishers, shut its doors for good. Most of the Aldine’s published after 1895 were not strictly speaking penny dreadfuls — Aldine dropped serial penny numbers in the 1890’s to concentrate on boys’ story papers and complete stories in booklet form. The Aldine building, which contained Aldine’s file copies, was destroyed in the London Blitz [10].A concise description of the penny dreadful is found in an article titled ‘The Literature of Vice,’ from The Bookseller, Feb 28, 1867. Penny dreadfuls were “issued in weekly numbers, at a half-penny or a penny each number. They almost uniformly consist of eight pages of large octavo, printed in double columns, in minion or brevier type, on paper quite equal to that of the ordinary penny newspapers. They are all illustrated with wood engravings; and of the woodcuts themselves we may observe, that some of them are little, if at all inferior, in drawing or engraving, to those commonly seen in the London Journal or the Leisure Hour.” Penny numbers were published weekly, every Saturday.

—♠—

[2] J. P. Quaine in his Melbourne bookshop

Most penny dreadful serials inhabited a strange, weird, and mysterious territory between the two extremes of wealth and poverty. “Our scenes will range from the highest to the lowest...,” wrote James Malcolm Rymer in one penny romance, The Dark Woman; or, Plot and Passion, from 1861. Plots of penny serials introduced readers to a polluted underworld of corrupted royalty, twisted aristocrats, high-toby-men, prison-breakers, and artful dodgers, with background scenery which shifted from the scented bed-chambers of royalty to the meanest hovels above the sewers of London. The road to Newgate Prison was short and quick, with Calcraft The Hangman, or Jack Ketch, with his name like a raven’s caw, waiting at the edge of the scaffold. The critics main complaint was not against the blood, violence, and sexuality exposed in sensational penny numbers, but the contempt for Queen, State, Church, and Law which had its origins in radical freethinking movements of the early nineteenth century.

The struggle with the difficulties of nature,
or with savage foes, or with wild animals, which so greatly attracts all
English lads, is exchanged for a struggle with the law, its agents, and
civilized society [11].

— ‘The Revival of Newgate Literature,’ The Spectator, June 27, 1868

The plots of nineteenth century romances, melodramas, penny bloods and penny dreadfuls consisted of abandoned orphans of mysterious parentage, stolen wills, lost inheritance, masks, disguise, ambiguous sexuality, and emotional and physical violence. Vice was punished, and virtue rewarded, just as it happened on the stage. Many of the heroes — or anti-heroes, were figures from criminal history such as Jonathan Wild, Jack Sheppard and Blueskin (real name Joseph Blake). Female characters were defined as spotless saints or fallen women. Material events were driven by divine providence, coincidence, and fate. For the most part the Victorian public, who we are accustomed to view as prudes, shying at naked table-legs, viewed criminal romances with equanimity and read them for pleasure. Perhaps it is significant that most criminal romances were written under the shadow of the scaffold, with public executions a near monthly occurrence in the United Kingdom until the year 1868.

Killing time has come round again. The Judges are
performing their periodical circuits; and, here and there, as the grave
impersonation of the law’s majesty departs from the assize town, some guilty
wretch, “under sentence,” is “left for execution.” A considerable relaxation in
the severity of prison treatment at once takes place towards the condemned. He
is more kindly treated than heretofore; he is better fed, more commodiously
lodged; friends are allowed to visit him, and a pious chaplain devotes himself
to his spiritual welfare. But, notwithstanding all this sympathy, certain dread
arrangements are put into progress.

JACK KETCH slips down from Town early, and
by a night train, and the fatal proceeding dawns. The time is not far distant
when we shall look back with as great horror at the practice of public
executions as we now revert with indignation to the torture which our
forefathers applied.

Great, no doubt, has been our advance along the road of
civilisation within the last few years — the mitigation of our criminal code being amongst the best systems of
national improvement. But we have improved but slowly. It was only in 1790 that
the law for putting criminals to death by burning was repealed. And some of the
present generation can recall the frequent Monday morning’s work at the Old
Bailey, when you turned your head away, and buried your eyes more deeply in the
straw of the hackney coach you sat in, because the crowd at the top of
Newgate-street announced that some half-dozen sheep stealers, &c.,
including a woman or two, were expiating their offences, as it was called, by undergoing
strangulation.

These sickening proofs of lingering barbarism are past. We do
not presume to say that capital punishment is now more often inflicted than the
safety of society demands; but we wonder that its public exhibition can still
be tolerated, being confident that this must eventually be withdrawn, as a
brutal and most brutalizing practice [12].— ‘Public Executions,’The Era, 1854

Even when romantic scenes were set in the distant past the cardboard heroes and villains of the penny numbers walked, laughed, and fought in the real streets of London — in Wych Street, Hyde Park, Fleet Street, and the Seven Dials. The contemporary reader of the fifties and sixties could shudder as he/she imagined the highwaymen, resurrection men, foot-pads, and boy burglars walking the same streets on view from their own bedroom windows.

There is scarcely a writer at the present day, I
believe, connected with the periodical press, but who has written picturesque,
humorous, or descriptive sketches, upon the sights, characters, and
curiosities, natural and physical, of the Great Metropolis, the Great Wen, the
Modern Babylon, the World of London, the Giant City, the Monster Metropolis,
the Nineveh of the nineteenth century, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera [13].—‘Curiosities of London,’Household Words, 1855

[3]

London’s streets and alleys were redolent with history and romance. A boy who read Edward Viles’s Blueskin, a Romance, could personally visit the locations mentioned in the book, which began with a scene set in Wych Street.

On The north side of Wych Street, nearly about the
centre, is the entrance to New Inn, through which in the daytime there is a
thoroughfare into the dismal region of Clare Market. In a narrow court of this
street the notorious Jack Sheppard served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the
carpenter; and in White Lion passage stood the ‘hostelrie’ of the “White Lion”
the scene of many of the events in the career of that prince of “cracksmen,”
who used nightly to meet in the tap-room his professional friends and
acquaintances, and with whose feats and various adventures the pen of Mr.
Harrison Ainsworth has made us so familiar [14].— Old and New London, Edward Walford, vol. 3

In the nineteenth century penny dreadfuls were considered ephemera; the writers, illustrators, and engravers carried out their tasks in anonymity, and few mourned their passing. In our own time, we are more tolerant of the lower class attributes of popular culture, the literature of the masses. The lives and adventures of the purveyors of “gallows literature,” are as fascinating as they are elusive.

[3] Boys Will Be Boys:
The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick
Barton, et al by E. S. Turner, was published in London by Michael Joseph Ltd.
in October 1948. A new revised edition followed in 1957 and a further new
revised edition in 1975.

[4] ‘The Great
Unchanged,’The Spectator, May 3, 1845, p.420

[5] The earliest
mention of fictional “penny parts” I could find was in the Durham Chronicle March 26, 1825 in which we discover a description of street boys selling cheap knock-offs of Memoirs of Harriette Wilson in penny and two penny numbers.

[6] Reminiscences of a
Country Journalist, Thomas Frost, p.176

[7] Dec 6, 1951, Papers
and Correspondence of Stanley Lorin Larnach, The University of Sydney

Profile

Cartoonist, illustrator, storyteller, born in Nelson, B.C. in May 1950, has contributed to Chronicle, Weirdom, and Visions fanzines. John illustrated ‘Ronald and the Dragon’ by Lawrie Peters in 1975. Email: adcock34@gmail.com